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Naval aircraft assigned to land-based roles


Slater

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Looking at carrier-capable fighters such as the F-4 and F/A-18, their structures are somewhat more heavy-duty than their land-based counterparts in order to withstand the punishment of arrested landings and catapult launches. Using the Hornet as an example, one would think that this would give it's land-based examples (Finland, Switzerland, Kuwait, etc.) an extended fatigue life since they're not enduring the punishment of carrier operations. Is this accurate or misleading?

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There was a purely land based version of the Hornet to be marketed  by Northrop called the F-18L, leaving the navalised version to McDonnell Douglas.

 

Unfortunately, no one bit, so for economy of scale purposes everyone ordered the navalised version.

 

Trevor

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6 hours ago, Max Headroom said:

There was a purely land based version of the Hornet to be marketed  by Northrop called the F-18L, leaving the navalised version to McDonnell Douglas.

 

Unfortunately, no one bit, so for economy of scale purposes everyone ordered the navalised version.

 

Trevor

 

And the Hornet (although it was then called the Cobra) started life as a land based fighter; the YF-17 which lost the USAF LWF competition to the F-16.

Edited by magwitch
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On December 28, 2016 at 1:16 PM, Slater said:

Looking at carrier-capable fighters such as the F-4 and F/A-18, their structures are somewhat more heavy-duty than their land-based counterparts in order to withstand the punishment of arrested landings and catapult launches. Using the Hornet as an example, one would think that this would give it's land-based examples (Finland, Switzerland, Kuwait, etc.) an extended fatigue life since they're not enduring the punishment of carrier operations. Is this accurate or misleading?

 

Its misleading for the F/A-18. The airframe is designed to be very rigid so to absorb the carrier stresses. This makes it less able to absorb the different stresses for conventional take-offs, landings and field operations. As a result, different components are exposed to stress that it was never designed for, and thus exhibit greater fatigue life. Without constant life extentions refits Canadian CF-18s actually have less usable life hours than their american counterparts. 

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Its really what you design an airframe to do. If its designed only to slam down on a deck, then its going to be really good at that... which the Hornet is. However because its so rigid it transfers all shocks to the airframe, even really small ones. Driving our CF-18s over pavement cracks over and over and over again actually started causing serious fatigue life issues, which required correcting. Furthermore, Canadian pilots tended to land the Hornet differently on runways than what it was intended, which created different stresses on the airframe. We had to correct for that as well. There were secondary factors that can't be ignored either: our training ranges tended to be beside our bases, so the aircraft saw higher stress usage rates as well... when you're flying from Carriers, there is more benign transit time too. 

 

Obviously you'll have different experiences with different aircraft, but in the case of the Hornet, conventional take-offs and landings contributed to the aircraft experiencing higher rates of fatigue life than what a "carrier based" aircraft would see. 

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Difficult to say what suffer the most, as even carrier aircraft doesn't spend their whole ops life on a given carrier. Don't know exactly but I would say no more than 2/3.

If I take Rafale as an exemple, difference between M and C are not found on the wings (Not foldable on the M), but mainly on the U/C, as the front leg on M weight 150kg more than on C.

Overall, the weight difference is about 700kg altogether, shared between U/C, a specific hook, a build-in ladder to access the pit, two battery instead of one, and a few bits here and there.

 

I don't think there are much difference in the maintenance program, the bigger one being certainly the corrosion control check out, more thorough for aircraft based near the sea, not to say sea-based.

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